We had spent 3 days larging it in Ibiza town and staying in a not very nice budget hotel and the plan was to go to Formentera, get a bit of luxury and relax into the rest of the holiday before returning to the UK.

We arrived at Club Maryland and saw the lovely reception and thought to ourselves that it was going to be a great few days. We were given the key to our room and arranged to meet our friends by the pool immediately after dumping our bags. Walking through the hotel complex, we started to realise this wasn't going to be what we thought it was.

As we progressed along the path, we saw various signs for 'theatre', 'disco', 'kids club' and then saw an over enthusiastic lanky teenager in uniform and matching baseball cap leading a group of 20 kids with tennis rackets along the path. When he saw us and our suitcases, he immediately instructed the kids in Italian to greet us. The kids shouted 'Benvenuto!!' in unison and carried on along the path. Bemused, we thought this was probably a family resort and not one that a group of 8 twenty somethings were going to find a great deal of fun in.

We arrived at the apartment and were horrified to find that it was tiny, dark, cramped and stank of stale, fusty, mouldy air. There were ants running around all over the floor and the kitchen and bathroom were so 1970's throwback it was unbelievable (orange tiles, mouldy shower curtain, rusty fridge, get the picture?). Now, I don't mind if somewhere is a little bit old fashioned if you're not paying much for the privilege, but we had paid £678 for a 4 night stay and certainly didn't expect such an awful standard of accommodation. We immediately complained to the reception and they agreed to send someone down to clean the room. 20 mins later a maid knocked at the door with an industrial sized can of air freshener and a can of insect spray. My partner was showering at the time so I asked her to come back in 10 mins. She seemed a bit bothered but she left. 5 mins later she knocked again and I said we weren't ready yet - but she started shouting in Spanish so we let her in. She proceeded to spray the whole apartment (top to bottom) with both the air freshener and insect spray, sending us both running into the open air coughing fits and gulping for air.

We went to meet the others by the pool and everyone had the same feeling as us, annoyed that we'd been conned into paying almost £700 upfront for a hotel that was clearly not up to scratch let alone the 4* luxury experience they'd led us to believe on the website. We all agreed it didn't matter, as long as we could have some peace and quiet and relax by the pool. It even didn't matter that all of the sunbeds were broken in the middle. And then the club reps started their DJing slot over the PA system by the pool. So we couldn't even relax, we had to listen to the sounds of the Spanish version of a Butlins style redcoat encouraging everyone to the darts competition followed by the Limbo contest....

Awful. Simply awful.